Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser wins 2025 Stella Prize

24 May 2025

Sydney based author Michelle de Kretser has been named winner of the 2025 Stellar Prize, for her 2024 novel, Theory & Practice, a novel Stella judges say does not read like a novel:

In her refusal to write a novel that reads like a novel, de Kretser instead gifts her reader a sharp examination of the complex pleasures and costs of living.

The novel that does not read like a novel, is indeed a curious work:

It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students — and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray. Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.

Established in 2013, the Stellar Prize, which is awarded annually, honours the work of Australian women and non-binary writers.

Jony Ive and Sam Altman announce collaboration in video lovefest

24 May 2025

Jony Ive, former Chief Design Officer at Apple, founded LoveFrom in 2019, when he left Apple, with Australian designer Marc Newson. In 2024, Ive established io, as a vehicle to move into the AI space.

A few days ago we learned Ive is joining forces with OpenAI founder Sam Altman, and io will merge with OpenAI. You take the last letter of OpenAI, pair it with the first, and you get io, right? The merger however sounds like the tech/design collaboration made in heaven.

No clues have been offered as to what can be expected of this coming together, other than an AI device of some sort. According to a Wired article published last September, it will be “a product that uses AI to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone“.

If you haven’t see the video announcing Ive and Altman’s partnership, and have a spare nine minutes, take a look. What a beautiful tech bro bromance we have going on here.

Have AI chatbots killed off question and answer website Stack Overflow?

22 May 2025

Activity at question and answer website Stack Overflow is at an all-time low, according to a recent article in The Pragmatic Engineer. Question levels are presently similar to what they were in 2008, the year Stack Overflow launched. Although the decline in use could be attributed to a number of factors, AI appears to be the main culprit. If people have a coding or application development question, it seems they are now going to ask a chatbot for the answer.

A graph charting question activity on Stack Overflow, compiled by Marc Gravell, makes for compelling viewing. Activity reached an all time high in 2014, but slowly began falling away.

Maybe this could be ascribed to the presence of competitors in the question and answer space, such as Quora, GitHub, and of course Reddit. Aside though from a surge of activity in 2020, when more people were working from home as a result of COVID lockdowns, and unable to brainstorm solutions to problems in the workplace, use of Stack Overflow has been declining ever since.

Some people seem to be suggesting the website may close. I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that. Stack Overflow has been a great help to me over the years, and is just about the first place I turn to when I have a website or coding question. Almost without variation, someone else has had the exact same difficulty, and I have just about always found a tried and true solution.

I’ve tried using AI for some code-related queries I have, but so far the suggestions made there are not as sound, or are simply no use at all. Hang in there Stack Overflow.

Should cook book writers sue each other for plagiarism or AI chatbots?

22 May 2025

Malcolm Knox, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, regarding accusations of plagiarism made by Sydney based Australian cook Nagi Maehashi against Brisbane counterpart Brooke Bellamy:

Nagi and Brooke will be out of their jobs when Microsoft, Google, Meta and the rest of big tech develop AIs to deliver the same caramel slice recipe, at zero cost, provided by an “author” whose personality combines the best of Julia Child, Margaret Fulton, Yotam Ottolenghi, even Nagi and Brooke.

Knox has a point. Perhaps the cooks should be more concerned about the mass appropriation of copyrighted material, without permission or recompense, rather than the alleged wrongdoing of one person, which may be near nigh impossible to prove. Not that the odds of prevailing against big tech would be any better.

I write this in the wake of another AI chatbot surge of activity on this website a few nights ago. Several hundred posts were presumably indexed in a matter of minutes, in the name of machine learning. Sometimes if something I posted here has been used as the basis for a question posed to an AI bot, a link to the source material is supplied with the answer generated.

At least I score a visit or two out of it all.

Cafes in the United States seek to discourage remote workers staying all day

22 May 2025

Some coffee shops in the United States have begun cracking down on people who use their place for hours, maybe even all day, as an office. Some store owners are imposing time limits on remote workers, switching off WIFI, or blocking access to powerpoints.

Fair enough too. Australian cafe operators are acutely aware of the challenges of running a profitable business, and having someone hogging a table all day, only makes matters worse.

Some owners hope a table will generate perhaps forty dollars an hour, on the expectation several parties occupy that table over the course of an hour. It seems doubtful to me that a remote worker, sitting at a table for, say, eight hours, would even spend forty dollars all day.

The estimated lifespan of the universe has been reduced, adjust your calendars

22 May 2025

The cosmos may not last quite as long was previously envisaged. New calculations have shown that the final stellar remnants in the universe will cease to be in 10⁷⁸ years time, rather than the originally thought 10¹¹⁰⁰ years. That’s a significant shift in the timeline, however you look at it.

The stellar remnants part of that sentence seems to be key here though. I think. The last star in the universe — which probably won’t even be born for an eternity — will cease shining at some point in the long distant future, but its remains will take 10⁷⁸ years to turn into near nothingness.

Then, I think, it’ll be curtains for the universe. But what even is 10⁷⁸? I’m awful at maths and have no idea, but, according to the Thinkster Learning website, 10⁷⁸ is a one followed by rather a lot of zeros. It looks like a really long time to me.

If there’s something you were hoping to achieve though, it seems like it might be a good idea to get on with it. There’s nothing more motivating than a tight deadline…

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astronomy, humour, science

Nam Le wins 2025 NSW Literary Awards Book of the Year prize

21 May 2025

Vietnamese Australian lawyer turned writer Nam Le has won the Book of the Year Award prize, with 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, a collection of poetry, in the 2025 NSW Literary Awards.

Earlier, Le was named recipient of the Multicultural NSW Award. Winners of the NSW Literary Awards, previously known as the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, which span eleven categories, including the people’s choice prize, were announced at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, on Monday 19 May 2025. The Book of the Year recipient is selected from the winners of the Award’s other categories.

Other recipients include Fiona McFarlane, who won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction with Highway 13, and Emma Lord, who took out the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature prize for her debut novel Anomaly. The full list of 2025 winners can be seen here.

Authors deeply divided over use of generative AI says BookBub

21 May 2025

United States based book discovery service BookBub recently asked twelve hundred writers about their thoughts on generative AI. Unsurprisingly, opinion was sharply divided, with an almost exactly half of respondents either against the technology, or in favour of it.

Overall, opinions among authors are deeply divided — many consider any use of generative AI unethical and irresponsible, while others find it a helpful tool to enhance their writing and business processes. Some authors remain conflicted, and are still negotiating their own feelings about the utility and morality of this technology.

It seems to me these findings sum up the way people in general, not just authors, see generative AI.

disassociated is listed in the Internet Phone Book: call me on 492

19 May 2025

A colorful drawing activity is taking place on a table with a yellow book titled

Image courtesy of Ana Šantl.

disassociated has been included in the inaugural edition of the Internet Phone Book, a directory of over seven-hundred personal websites and blogs, compiled by Kristoffer Tjalve, and Elliott Cost.

An annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, featuring essays, musings and a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators.

You don’t read a great deal of poetry on my website, but Tjalve and Cost offer a definition of poetic in this interview with Meg Miller of Are.na, publishers of the book.

Being a phone directory, each listed website naturally comes with a “phone number”, a three digit code allocated by the authors, a kind of short-cut link, that lets you “call” through, I’m on 492.

As of the time I type, the book has sold out through the publisher’s website (I think another print is in the works), though it is available from selected stockists across Europe, and in South Korea.

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blogs, books, publishing

Winnie Dunn, Jumaana Abdu, Katerina Gibson, named Best Young Australian Novelists for 2025

19 May 2025

Winnie Dunn, Jumaana Abdu, and Katerina Gibson, have been named the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists for 2025.

Gibson also won the prize in 2023. Meanwhile Adbu’s novel Translations, has been shortlisted in this year’s Stella Prize, while Dunn’s novel Dirt Poor Islanders, was included on the longlist for the 2025 Miles Franklin award, which was announced last week.

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